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Development on the Xfce PulseAudio Plugin has been moving along at a steady pace, and the latest release marks the completion of another great feature for the Sound Indicator replacement applet.

What’s New?

New Feature: Multimedia Key Support

Multimedia keyboard support has been hit and miss in the Linux space for as long as there’s been multimedia keyboards. Support for these keys has been entirely dependent on support baked into each individual application. The best current example of this is the Spotify Linux client. Users can control the media player with various panel plugins, but not with their keyboards.

With the new multimedia key support in Xfce PulseAudio Plugin 0.3.3, the recently added MPRIS2 integration has been complemented with key bindings for the Play/Pause, Previous, Next, and Stop keys. When these keys are pressed, any actively running player known to the plugin will be notified, enabling keyboard playback control.

You can check out the new feature in the video below, where I very excitedly inundate my media players with playback commands.

General Improvements

Simplified device menus: The bold section headers have been replaced in favor of a single menu per input and output device. If there’s only one option available, the menu is no longer displayed.

Improved volume scale increments: The old defaults were steps of 6% and a max of 153%. These seemed a bit unusual, and have been replaced with a more sensible 5% and 150%.